Some dull stuff on partitioning and some other dull stuff regarding my stupidity

OK, so I managed to break Linux … twice. In a day. The first time was trying to uninstall some fussy sound drivers. The second time I did something with the Terminal which I wasn’t supposed to do.

Then I accidentally deleted the partition while trying to fix it. Aren’t I bright?

Then I had to restore the Windows bootloader using the Windows Recovery Enviroment. It’s included on the Vista disk but if you don’t have it you can still grab it here.

For now, I’m sticking for a virtual machine. But now I know how to partition hard drives, I’ve been looking on creating a recovery partition with some basic apps on it (just ’cause it’s a pain to reinstall Vista when things go wrong.) And somebody told me to try SelfImage. Although I haven’t tried it yet, looks like a nifty tool.

Also, some other things I learned:

There’s a built-in partitioner in Vista. This is very useful. There’s also one on the Windows Vista disc, when you’re installing.

Another trick I learned: You can create a data partition to seperate your files from your system. If you’re really looking at seperation, you can get a second hard drive. An advantage of this is that if your Windows decides its had enough of you, you’ll (hopefully) not lose all your stuff. But make sure to do your backups, folks. If your hard drive bursts into a ball of flames, a second partition isn’t going to help much.

I’m proud of myself.

I just created a dual-boot system (Vista Home Premium and Ubuntu 9.04) which actually works. I messed a couple things up and had to reinstall Ubuntu a couple times but it works and isn’t that the main thing?

Ways to Annoy People in a Computer Lab

Was doing some googling and stumbled on this. Enjoy!

40 Ways to Piss Off People in a Computer Lab

Vista Recovery Disc Download

For those who don’t have a retail disc, you can download a free (and legal) recovery disc here. At least Microsoft’s done one thing right for once.

Coppermine Photo Gallery

Haven’t gotten a chance to test it, but it looks rather nice. Needs PHP and mySQL on the webserver. Open-source.

Coppermine Photo Gallery

Need email forwarding? SoodoNims might be for you

OK, so a while back, due to spam, the administrator of a message board I frequent blocked Gmail. For a while, I used Yahoo Mail, but it’s a bit of a pain to forward everything manually (I got quite a few PM notifications, and I like to keep them for memories.)

So after a while, I found SoodoNims. Exactly what I needed, automatic email forwarding. If you need it, you can also delete the emails after a while or block certain domains (e.g. spam).

Oh, and one good thing: Just today, for some reason the emails weren’t coming through. I sent a quick email to the administrator, less than 2 hours later, it’s working again (and I even got the ‘missing’ emails!)

CheckPlaces

Nice Firefox extension to check both dead and duplicate bookmarks. Still in experimental but I haven’t had any problems with it (except it being slow, I have huge amount of bookmarks.)

CheckPlaces

CheckPlaces Download

Lots of duplicates? CloneSpy might work.

CloneSpy is one of those indispensible tools, one of the ones that I install first on a clean-install of Windows and never get rid of.  What it does is take checksums for a bunch of files and compares them to find duplicates.

One of the useful things is the “pools,” in which you can take two seperate sets of folders and compare them against each other, and sometimes automatically delete the duplicates from one of them.  For example, when I do a clean-install, I usually tend to restore all my data from a backup. And sometimes I’m reluctant to delete the Windows.old in case I accidentally delete a file I haven’t backed up. So what I do, I put the User folder into pool one, Windows.old into pool two and set it to automatically delete, then go take a bath. When I come back, the leftover files are still in Windows.old, so I transfer them over then delete.
Also especially useful for duplicate pictures. One limitation in VisiPics is that even on “strict” setting, it sometimes grabs pictures which are very similar, but not quite. (I’m a bit of a hoarder.) So by checking the checksums, it can find the exact same one.
Oh and it’s free. Free is always good with me.

Extremely strange Windows promo

It’s for Windows 386, I think the video’s from 1988. Either way, it’s incredibly weird and a little painful to watch. Everyone I showed it to agreed.

The first part is boring, to get to the interesting part skip ahead to 7:00.

My new camera

It’s a FujiFilm FinePix S3000. Nice little camera, got it at a yard sale for $10. Although I had to pay $30 more for a card reader, still pretty cheap.

Couple of piccies I took with it.
Woke up the poor cat from his afternoon nap:

My floppy disk:

I wasn’t aware my cat was into computers:

And this is my main computer: